


I Won't Be Home for Christmas

by willowoak_walker



Category: Girl Genius (Webcomic)
Genre: Epistolary, Future History, Gen, Transylvania Polygnostic University, vague mantions of ambiguous abuse
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-24
Updated: 2018-02-24
Packaged: 2019-03-23 13:27:15
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 569
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13788699
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/willowoak_walker/pseuds/willowoak_walker
Summary: A letter from a student at TPU to a relative in England, a little over a hundred years from the time of the canon.





	I Won't Be Home for Christmas

Dearest Cecilia,

I won’t be coming home for Christmas. I’m telling Mama that it’s an anthropological investigation — the Europans have such a different view of Christmas that it’s bound to be interesting.

But I can be honest with you, dear, and I’m afraid she’ll go too far this time. She doesn’t seem to accept that I’m not a Spark, and not likely to become one.

I can understand why: Four generations of aelocognitive women on her side, and father, grandmother, and grandfather Sparks as well — but aelocognition is dreadfully complicated, and no-one has done any great research into brains of living Sparks since the first Baron Wulfenbach. Partly because it’s inherently unethical, of course. Brain coring, really!

  
  


I’d like to think that science has moved beyond that, but the Wulfenbach Evidence is still the greatest resource we have. Almost a hundred years! No, forgive me. It’s that everyone here is preparing for the Centennial. But that celebrates the Triune Peace, which isn’t _Klaus_ Wulfenbach at all. Really, all this changing of leaders, how do they keep everyone straight?

Anyway, _more_ than a hundred years, and the understanding we have of the aelocognitive brain is based on the work a very busy man undertook in his downtime. By himself, with primitive tools, by destroying parts of living people’s brains.

  
  


But I digress. My dear Cecilia, I was writing to tell you I’m staying at TPU for Christmas. Don’t worry — Beetleburg may not be a very Christian city, given the Jewish, Muslim, Norse, and Skifandrian populations, but it is a civilized one. Christians don’t have the sole hold on morals, you know! I’ve met many Christians far less moral than some of the Jewish students here.

This isn’t Old Mechanicsburg, my dear, I shan’t be sacrificed for the return of the sun. For science, perhaps, but that’s more likely over the semester and I do take care.

Being homocognitive doesn’t make me stupid, you know.

  
  


But in any case, all of my Europan friends are very excited to show me the Christmas celebrations the University has planned, and to exchange gifts in person where they can see my face. You remember the ticking alligator? I should never have mentioned that I enjoyed Peter Pan, but I confess that I would have like to set it loose on young Lady Sturmvoraus, who says that she deserved it.

And no, dear, she doesn’t think that using that name makes people think she isn’t a royal child, it just allows a certain layer of legal isolation from the status.

Insulting Princess Lilith, the great-niece of the reigning Heterodyne and granddaughter of the current Storm Queen, is a big deal.

Insulting your classmate Lilith Sturmvoraus is typical college shenanigans.

  
  


She’s really quite lovely — as a person, I mean, she isn’t all that pretty. That distressingly untidy royal hair, the nose, the stitches — she had to have an eye replaced after an assassination attempt, and they didn’t bother to match it.

She’s vital, though, as if she’s more alive than even the rest of the Sparks. If her great-grandfather was like that I can understand what happened to Ardesly Wooster.

But she’s very kind. She makes a point of knowing what all of her friends like and what we can afford and when our birthdays are — things like that.

And speaking of! I’ve attached your present.

I hope you like it.

  


Your loving niece,

Emilia Thorpe


End file.
